Thunderbird/Students/StatusUpdates/2010-03-19

Status Updates

Zach Church

Sorry I've been MIA for a couple weeks... camping for spring break, and there were no internets. I've completed all of the changes Blake suggested when I submitted my patch, but I need to write more tests. However, I'm having a hard time getting the Mozmill tests to pass, even without my patch applied, so I need to figure that out. Once that's done, writing the tests that I need to write shouldn't be a problem.

Lindauson Hazell

Firstly, I apologize for missing last week's post, I moved international to St. Kitts (Leeward Islands, Caribbean).

I was puzzled for some time about the the code that impacted the menu overlay settings. I had been told at the beginning, in the bug definition that all I needed to do is insert the missing control elements into the mailWindowOverlay.xul.

Well, that should have been simple, but its been this long and I'm still not done. Primarily because I've been on a wild goose chase (well sorta). Apparently there are multiple mailWindowOverlay.xul files. I was simply editing the wrong one.

So, my changes are at least impacting the ui, but just not in the way that I expect it to. For example, disabling a menu object in code dosen't necessarily disable the on-status of that object at runtime, but removing the initialization somehow does.

Gonna keep working on this. I'm a little slower than most at this, but I think I'm close.

Lin

Wei Xian Woo

My work on supporting additional window types is currently suspended. After Blake's 2nd review of my first patch, I made a few minor changes he suggested and submitted the patch again for a 3rd review -- this time by Andrew Sutherland. He pointed out a number of things and I spent the week making some of these changes. They include:

• Listening to the "quit-application" event, which is essential to handling the "File -> Quit" case. It was apparent from Andrew's very first comment about my patch that I made a false assumption.

• Renaming some functions so their names would be slightly more descriptive. For example, |getState| vs |getWindowStateForSessionPersistence| in the 3-pane window class.

• Making the interaction between the session store manager and the 3-pane window more natural. By trying to preserve existing logic made things seem somewhat awkward.

• Adding detail to some comments. For example, "the last state string" vs "the JSON stringified representation of the last saved state".

I expect to submit a revised patch before the end of the coming week.

Who’s writing the blog post this week?

Tim Miller